PUYB

The Ashes by Vincent Zandri

FTC: I received a free copy of this book from Pump Up Your Book in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.

The Ashes by Vincent Zandri was different from anything that I have read lately.  I read this book from cover to cover in two days because I didn’t want to put it down.  Once I started reading it, I just kept on reading it because I wanted to know what was going to happen.  I spent a good part of this book trying to figure out if “Skinner” was a real person or if he was some creature.  I am not going to say what I found out because I don’t want to ruin the book for anyone.  I enjoyed this book the entire time, and it is one that I know I will read again in the future.  This is also the second book in the series, and I am for sure going to go back and read the first book because I am hooked.  If you love horror books, I would for sure recommend this book to you because I am not usually into horror books and this one made me want to check out more books in this genre.

About The Book

HORROR IN THE DARK WOODS

It’s been eight years since artist and single mom, Rebecca Underhill, was abducted and left to die in an old broken down house located in the middle of the dark woods. But even if her abductor, Joseph William Whalen, has since been killed, another, more insidious evil is once more out to get her in the form of the Skinner. The son of an abusive butcher, Skinner, intends on finishing the job Whalen started but failed at.

How is he going to get to Rebecca?

He’s going to do it through her children, by luring them into the cornfield behind the old farmhouse they live in.

HORROR IN THE DEPTHS

Now, armed with the knowledge that the Skinner has escaped incarceration at a downstate facility for the criminally insane, Rebecca must face the most horrifying challenge of her adult life: Rescuing the children not from a house in the woods, but from the abandoned tunnels that run underneath her property.

But the Skinner is watching Rebecca’s every move.

Horrifying question is, will she live long enough to save the children?

About The Author

Winner of the 2015 PWA Shamus Award and the 2015 ITW Thriller Award for Best Original Paperback Novel, Vincent Zandri is the NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and AMAZON KINDLE No.1 bestselling author of more than 25 novels including THE REMAINS, MOONLIGHT WEEPS, EVERYTHING BURNS, and ORCHARD GROVE. He is also the author of numerous Amazon bestselling digital shorts, PATHOLOGICAL, TRUE STORIES and MOONLIGHT MAFIA among them. Harlan Coben has described THE INNOCENT (formerly As Catch Can) as “…gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting,” while the New York Post called it “Sensational…Masterful…Brilliant!” Zandri’s list of domestic publishers include Delacorte, Dell, Down & Out Books, Thomas & Mercer and Polis Books, while his foreign publisher is Meme Publishers of Milan and Paris. An MFA in Writing graduate of Vermont College, Zandri’s work is translated in the Dutch, Russian, French, Italian, and Japanese. Recently, Zandri was the subject of a major feature by the New York Times. He has also made appearances on Bloomberg TV and FOX news. In December 2014, Suspense Magazine named Zandri’s, THE SHROUD KEY, as one of the “Best Books of 2014.” Recently, Suspense Magazine selected WHEN SHADOWS COME as one of the “Best Books of 2016”. A freelance photo-journalist and the author of the popular “lit blog,” The Vincent Zandri Vox, Zandri has written for Living Ready Magazine, RT, New York Newsday, Hudson Valley Magazine, The Times Union (Albany), Game & Fish Magazine, and many more. He lives in New York and Florence, Italy.

WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:

WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK

Buy A Copy

Amazon

Add-On Goodreads

Let’s Be Friends

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Excerpt

(more…)

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2017 Margaret Margaret

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor

 

FTC: I received a free copy of this book from PUYB in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor was a book I was never able to get into.  I always try and find good things about books that I am reading, and it is rare for me to just not like anything about books.  I can always seem to find something that I enjoyed about the book, but this time I really didn’t enjoy this book.  I found that I was bored throughout most of the book.  I had a really hard time finishing this book because I was so bored with it.  I kept thinking while I was reading it was that it reminded me of a book that I would have read in high school.  That is really all I can say about this book because like I said I didn’t like it.  I am sure there are people who would really enjoy this book I just wasn’t one of them.

About The Book

FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER: GROWING UP IN THE SIXTIES AND THE COLD WAR tells the story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family during the Cold War.  Her father, an aviator in the Marines and later the Army, was transferred more than a dozen times to posts from Miami to California and Germany as the government’s Cold War policies demanded.  For the pilot’s wife and daughters, each move meant a complete upheaval of ordinary life.  The car was sold, bank accounts closed, and of course one school after another was left behind.  Friends and later boyfriends lined up in memory as a series of temporary attachments.  The book describes the dramas of this traveling household during the middle years of the Cold War.  In the process, FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER shows how the larger turmoil of American foreign policy and the effects of Cold War politics permeated the domestic universe. The climactic moment of the story takes place in the spring of 1968, when the author’s father was stationed in Vietnam and she was attending college in Paris.  Having left the family’s quarters in Heidelberg, Germany the previous fall, she was still an ingénue; but her strict upbringing had not gone deep enough to keep her anchored to her parents’ world.  When the May riots broke out in the Latin quarter, she attached myself to the student leftists and American draft resisters who were throwing cobblestones at the French police. Getting word of her activities via a Red Cross telegram delivered on the airfield in Da Nang, Vietnam, her father came to Paris to find her. The book narrates their dramatically contentious meeting and return to the American military community of Heidelberg.  The book concludes many years later, as the Cold War came to a close.  After decades of tension that made communication all but impossible, the author and her father reunited.  As the chill subsided in the world at large, so it did in the relationship between the pilot and his daughter. When he died a few years later, the hard edge between them, like the Cold War stand-off, had become a distant memory.

About The Author

Mary Lawlor grew up in an Army family during the Cold War.  Her father was a decorated fighter pilot who fought in the Pacific during World War II, flew missions in Korea, and did two combat tours in Vietnam. His family followed him from base to base and country to country during his years of service. Every two or three years, Mary, her three sisters, and her mother packed up their household and moved. By the time she graduated from high school, she had attended fourteen different schools. These displacements, plus her father?s frequent absences and brief, dramatic returns, were part of the fabric of her childhood, as were the rituals of base life and the adventures of life abroad.

As Mary came of age, tensions between the patriotic, Catholic culture of her upbringing and the values of the sixties counterculture set family life on fire.  While attending the American College in Paris, she became involved in the famous student uprisings of May 1968.  Facing her father, then posted in Vietnam, across a deep political divide, she fought as he had taught her to for a way of life completely different from his and her mother’s.

Years of turbulence followed.  After working in Germany, Spain and Japan, Mary went on to graduate school at NYU, earned a Ph.D. and became a professor of literature and American Studies at Muhlenberg College.  She has published three books, Recalling the Wild (Rutgers UP, 2000), Public Native America (Rutgers UP, 2006), and most recently Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Rowman and Littlefield, September 2013).

She and her husband spend part of each year on a small farm in the mountains of southern Spain.

Her latest book is the memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War.

WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK

Buy A Copy

Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Add-On Goodreads

Let’s Be Friends

Excerpt

(more…)

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2017 Margaret Margaret

The Key To Cabo by Dave Harrold

Book Review Graphic

FTC: I received a free copy of this book from Pump Up Your Book in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.

The Key to Cabo by Dave Harrold was a good book but not my favorite if I am honest. It reminded me of the Jack Reacher books which I love, but at times I get to the point where I have a hard time getting into the stories because I know that he would have died a million times if he was a real life person. I felt like I had a hard time connecting with the characters in this book as well and I am not sure why that is. I usually love all books in this genre, but for some reason, this book just didn’t work out for me. If you love mystery books than I would for sure, say check this one out and give it a shot especially if you love the Jack Reacher type of mystery/suspense books.

the-key-to-cabo-by-dave-harrold

About The Book

Danger is a way of life for Rock Pounder, so when the DEA asks him to recover $250 million in drug money hidden somewhere in Mexico, the 10% finder’s fee makes the risk worthwhile for Rock and his team. But when his beautiful publisher Penelope Dickens Frost finds herself in possession of a key that leads to the drug money, he finds trouble on more levels than he ever expected.

Penelope is one of the only women who hasn’t immediately fallen for Rock’s charms, but things heat up as the two of them race across the Mexican desert on Rock’s dirt bike, with drug lord El Raton in hot pursuit.

From Dallas to Cabo San Lucas and into mainland Mexico, Rock and Penelope follow the money trail, with Rock’s unique team aiding in the escapade. But someone on the inside is betraying them. And publisher Penelope Dickens Frost proves to be almost more than even Rock Pounder can handle in this high-octane thriller, the second book in the Rock Pounder series.

dave-harrold

About The Author

Dave Harrold is the author of “Motorcycle High: The Adventures of Rock Pounder” and “The Key to Cabo,” the second book in the Rock Pounder series. Dave is originally from Chatsworth, California, and he also lived in Huntington Beach, California before moving to Texas. He is a motorcycle adventure rider and has traveled all over the world on his Kawasaki KLR. His true-life adventures are woven into the fabric of his Rock Pounder tales. Dave lives in McKinney, TX with his wife Judy, where he is working on his third Rock Pounder adventure, set in Burma, Shanghai, and Las Vegas.

Buy A Copy

Add-On Goodreads

Let’s Be Friends!

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2016 Margaret Margaret

The Ghostwriters by Mickey J. Corrigan

Book Review Graphic

FTC: I received a free copy of this book from Pump Up Your Book in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.

The Ghostwriters by Mickey J. Corrigan was a different book for me. That being said I did end up smiling throughout the book because of the author’s style of writing. I loved that the main character Jacy would start “talking” to the reader during the book. I liked that because it made me feel like I was having a conversation with her and that made the book even more real to me. This was a shorter book, so I was able to get through it pretty quickly and this is one of the few books that I wish was longer because I fell in love with Jacy from the start and I was sad when the book ended. I am sure that this is a book that most people would enjoy even if this isn’t your favorite genre of book. If you have read it what did you think of it?

the-ghostwriters-by-mickey-j-corrigan

About The Book

She’s ghostwriting a book for a famous author–a recently deceased one. A struggling writer living in Manhattan, Jacy McMasters is the first to admit she’s a terrific liar and a screw-up. Then the ghost of the famous novelist JD Balinger asks her to “channel” a follow-up to his classic coming of age book, The Watcher in the Sky. Along with her new boyfriend, a bear of a man who has no patience for mind games, the ghost in Jacy’s head forces her to confront a lifetime of secrets—dark secrets. Secrets she’s been keeping from herself.

mickey-j-corrigan

About The Author

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan lives and writes and gets into trouble in South Florida, where the men run guns and the women run after them.

Buy A Copy

Add-On Goodreads

Let’s Be Friends

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2016 Margaret Margaret

23 Minutes Past 1 A.M. by Robert J. Dornan

23-minutes-banner-2

FTC: I received a free copy of this book from Pump Up Your Book in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.

23 Minutes Past 1 A.M. by Robert J. Dornan was an interesting book, to say the least. I have always been a huge fan of books like this that take a part of history and tell a story about something that could have happened during the period. This one-time frame that comes to mind would be how much I love the WWII period, and I love the books that are fiction but could have happened, and this book was like that for me. I don’t know much about this event so I am not sure how accurate this book would be but I did love this book. I felt like I knew a little bit more about this period than I did when I started the book. I did find at times that I would bog down in some of the details in the book so I would just put the book down and come back to later when I was able to focus more. I felt like I got to know the characters and understand what and why they were thinking and doing the things that they did. It was also a pretty easy book to read, so I also enjoyed that about this book. I believe that if you love thriller books then this book will be a great fit for you. If you have read this book what, did you think of it?

23 Minutes Past 1 A.M. by Robert J. Dornan

About The Book

In the early morning of her sister’s wedding day, Mila Kharmalov stared in stunned silence at the coloured sparks streaming from Reactor Four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant.  At that very moment, her life and the lives of everyone she knew changed forever.

Years later and on another continent, Adam Byrd was writing biographies for everyday people looking to leave their legacy in book form. When the woman he loved phoned from Kiev offering him the chance to write the story of a lifetime, he jumped at the opportunity not realizing that his voyage would be a bumpy ride through a nations dark underbelly. With the help of his friend’s quirky cousin, Adam is nudged into a fascinating adventure of love, greed, power and psychotic revenge, culminating with a shocking finale.
23 Minutes Past 1 A.M. is a work of fiction based on factual events from Chernobyl and villages throughout Ukraine.

bob-dornan

About The Author

Robert J Dornan is someone who wishes to leave a better world to his children. He realizes that the odds are slim but he will do whatever he can to increase the probability of success.  He is always open to discuss new and innovative ideas and hopes someday to see the building of a functional solar city as well as a fair and community-driven compensation system.

Robert’s latest book is the historical fiction, 23 Minutes Past 1 A.M.

For More Information

  • Visit Robert J. Dorman’s website.

Connect with Robert on Facebook and Twitter.

Buy A Copy

Add-On Goodreads

Let’s Be Friends!

Excerpt

(more…)

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2016 Margaret Margaret

Save The Last Dance by Eric Johnson and Eva Ungar Grudin

save-the-last-dance-banner

FTC: I received a free copy of this book from Pump Up Your Book in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.

Save The Last Dance by Eric Johnson and Eva Ungar Grudin was such a different book from what I usually read.  I have read one other book that was written similar to this one and if you want to check it out you can click here to read that review.  I loved this book because it felt like you were reading personal emails from actual people.  I know part of the reason I loved this book is because I love being nosy and know what is going on with strangers.  I did at times get frustrated because I wanted to know what the characters were thinking and what not.  I also felt frustrated when the book ended because you have no idea what ended up happening with the characters.  Even with all that being said I still really enjoyed this book and it is one that I will keep in my personal collection of books.

save-the-last-dance

About The Book

A tale of the power and peril of first love rediscovered.

Adam Wolf and Sarah Ross were teenage sweethearts who grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio in the late 50’s and early 60’s. They set a wedding date when they turned fifteen. The day came and went. For most of their lives the two were out of contact.

 

With their 50th high school reunion approaching, Adam and Sarah reconnect. Email exchanges – after the first tentative “hi”, then a deluge- five, ten- by the end of the week twenty emails a day. Soon Sarah admits, “All my life I’ve been looking for someone who loves me as much as you did”.
Written entirely in email and texts, Save the Last Dance allows the reader to eavesdrop on Sarah and Adam’s correspondence as their love reignites. It also permits the reader to witness the reactions of significant others, whose hum-drum lives are abruptly jolted by the sudden intrusion of long-dormant passion. Can Sarah and Adam’s rekindled love withstand the pummeling they’re in for?

eric-johnson-eva-ungar

About The Authors

Eric Joseph and Eva Ungar (Grudin) were teenage sweethearts in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who set a wedding date when they turned 15. The last time they saw each other they were 21 years old. Three years ago they reunited, around the time of the 50th high school reunion. Although their book is a work of fiction, it’s about a couple like them, who fall in love again, almost instantly, via email.

Eric is in public health, a consultant/educator at hospitals and clinics, concentrating his career on Native American health services across the country. Eva is an art historian who taught at Williams College in Massachusetts for 40+ years. She specialized in African and African-American art; the history of European painting: also Holocaust Studies – memorials and museums; In addition, she has performed in and written Sounding to A, a multi-media work about inheriting the Holocaust. It premiered at the Ko Festival of Performance in 2004.

Learn more about Eva and Eric and their history together by visiting hargrovepress.com – At the website you’ll find memories about their time together in the late 50s, early 60s, as well as interviews from today.
Their latest book is the literary fiction, Save The Last Dance.

For More Information

Visit the authors’ website.

Connect with authors on Facebook and Twitter.

Find out more about the authors at Goodreads.

Buy A Copy

 

Save The Last Dance is available at Amazon.

Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.

Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.

Add-On Goodreads

Let’s Be Friends

Excerpt

(more…)

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2016 Margaret Margaret